Outside of playing and watching America’s pastime, the
next best thing was collecting imagery and ink of it. A committed kid’s
favorite candy store brand was Topps and not Hershey. Then there was this
fascination with having a name written on any kind of paper in cursive. It was
the baseball fans two favorite non-active hobbies of collecting baseball cards
and autographs.
In Clutch’s early days Topps was tops, not sort of pun
intended. For a while it was the only game in town, and then like anything else
successful dusty roads formed as others started to roll in to town. Fleer and
Donruss were two that come to mind. Topps really controlled the market though
and their cards were considered the industry standard. Unfortunately baseball
cards are one of many victims of the Internet. Cards value from an information
perspective is just no longer there.
The buying process was pretty simple and streamline. The
purchaser would work hard to scrounge up the .35 cents needs to buy a “Pack”. A
pack was a sealed package of 10 or so cards that came with what else? A stick
of gum was included. It’s kind of impossible to think about that as a good
idea. Fusing a food product with a collectible is something that just wouldn’t
fly in current times. Likely some marketing executive at the company thought
the gum would entice the kid to make the purchase. Good idea, but it was
exactly the opposite of that. Nobody in the history of modern times purchased a
pack for the sugary benefit. We had bazooka-Joe for that.
Opening the pack and zipping through the random players
received was 10 seconds or so of Xanadu. Kids at the time had no concept of the
potential “Value” of the cards and just sought out their desires. Those were
almost always local team players, all-stars and just players that they may take
a fancy to. The things typically not wanted and frown worthy were team photo
cards, scrubs, odd stat cards and of course the dreaded “Check-list” card.
Little did anyone know that the true value was held in things such as “Rookie
card” status on players that would go on to be super-stars regardless of the
team they played for.
The question was what to do with the mass-produced
card-board? Well, first was to just look at it. The front was normally an
action or pre-posed photo, but the back was where the action was. It held the
players life-long stats including of course the past season, which was usually
of most interest. It also typically had other information such as all-star game
appearances, league leading categories and the all-important player
demographics like height, weight and hometown. Some cards included trivia or a
player factoid such as where he worked during the off-season! All of this data
is now a mouse-click away and no longer needed to be obtained by digging
through files for a hard-copy version.
If out of cash and having the want to get “New” or
“Different” cards, you would find a fellow collector of baseball cards and
barter one of many ways. The first was the straight out trade where you proposed
and negotiated a deal. Commonplace was to trade off “Doubles” (Multiple copies
of the same card received via bad luck in additional packs purchased) of decent
players. You can also trade players from
teams that our trade partner was a fan of while you were not. This was easy in
cities that had multiple teams like New York.
Though not a normal part of the deal other items could be thrown into to
close deals. Those items could be a Spaulding ball, mini high-bounce ball
(Those were fun for a limited time), cash, candy or anything else that one had
in their pocket at the time of sitting down at the negotiation table a.k.a.
sidewalk.
There was another non-commerce way to obtain cards –
which was the part-sport part-gambling game called “Flipping”. Two competitors
entered the arena with an evenly amount of cards scrambled in random order. You
entered the game knowing the result could be additional stock of cards, or
leaving with nothing. How it worked was each kid put a card face-up in a single
pile. Cards back then all had a solid colored border, typically the rainbow was
used and the colors closely matched the team. Anyway, the “War” kept going
until a kid dropped a card atop the pile that equally matched the border color
of the previous card. You then got the entire pile, placed it behind the cards
already in hand and the game started over again. It would end when one
contestant ran out of cards, submitted or got called home for dinner.
When the real baseball season ended and the cold weather
hit the card collecting season ended to. Most kids piled all their years keep
in one or more shoeboxes, sorted by team, and then tucked the box of gold away
in the back of the your room closet behind other things that were decreed as
much less valuable. Not to fear as a few short months later, though it seemed
like an eternity, a regular trip to the local candy store for that sugar rush
would generate smiles. The next year batch of cards arrived! It was time to
start the process all over again.
There are plenty of stories out there by disgruntled male
adults who are specifically mad at their mothers. The reasons are all the same
in that when these boys-to-men went away to college, the military, got married
or for any other reason vacated “Their room”, mom followed up with a major
cleanup part and parcel with converting a bedroom to a lounge or guest space.
With that came mass exodus of toys, matchbox cars, planet of the apes action
figures and those boxes in the back of the closet filled with cards.
For those like Mr. Clutch who were lucky enough to
preserve their past and get the goods out before the primitive version of
1-800-555-JUNK got to it, history is saved. Perusing through and touching those
cards from time to time brings back specific memories of where, when and how
they were obtained. It’s a glimmer back into a childhood that didn’t have the
technological advantage of documenting every step via a photo. Great times come back alive and still exist,
as does Al Oliver, Vida Blue and George Brett rookie cards.
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